Monday, February 13, 2012

GURPS: Conan now available in PDF

You have probably already read the news that Steve Jackson Games is re-releasing the GURPS Conan sourcebook and 4 adventures as PDFs. Perhaps this is a great side-benefit to their licensing for Munchkin Conan, and Mongoose no longer owning the RPG rights.

It's good to have these available again, at least for a short time. The sourcebook is a great starting point for anyone running a Hyborian Age RPG campaign, for use with ZeFRS or any other rules system. The map is as good as those done for Mongoose's Conan RPG. I've never read the adventures, so I'm eager to see them without paying used and rare prices.

Even so, the sourcebook does tend to be L. Sprague de Camp- and pastiche-centric, particularly the story chronology and the bibliography, which was the nature of the Conan Properties license at the time. All the pastiches and re-edited stories were jammed into the timeline as "official". de Camp wrote the sourcebook's introduction. He praises Howard's writing style more here than usual, which is welcome. However, de Camp does include a paragraph of his amateur psychoanalysis concerning issues that have been "deBunked" by Howard scholars in recent years.

It would be great to see the bibliography updated with more recent publications like the Wandering Star/Del Rey series, Mark Finn's excellent Howard biography, and others, and then available on the product webpage.

Check out a preview of the sourcebook PDF here.

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